In the latest, 120 people were killed in a wave of coordinated attacks in Paris on Friday, including a massacre during a rock concert by men shouting “Allahu akbar” and blaming France’s military intervention in Syria. “Make no mistake that resolve has only grown stronger in the wake of this unmistakable brutality”.
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“We have agreed to work towards a ceasefire, and to chart a course that will see the Syrian people take charge of their own destiny”, he said.
Multi-party ministerial talks on Syria, attended by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov among others, have ended at the Imperial Hotel in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
Since March 2011, Syria has been beset by foreign-backed militancy, which has so far claimed the lives of over 250,000 people and displaced millions of others. Because Assad is a member of a minority sect of Islam known as Alawites and the Shiite theocracy of Iran is one of his chief supporters, the radical Sunni Islamic State is able to frame the war in Syria in sectarian terms and convince potential supporters they are playing a key role in a battle for Islam’s future.
“The countries sitting around the table have nearly all experienced the same pain, the same terror”, she said, citing the recent Russian plane disaster in Egypt and suicide bombings in Beirut and Turkey.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad proposed that French support for opposition forces led to Friday’s Islamic State-maintained strikes in Paris.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Saturday condemned the terror attacks in Paris a day earlier, saying the French are suffering the same terror as the Syrians have been, according to the pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV.
Under the roadmap laid out by the envoys, a transitional government is to be set up within six months and new elections with 18 months.
Diplomats and leaders from 19 countries and groups may have come up with a timeline to end Syria’s civil war and elect a new government.
The 20 world powers at the talks agreed on the need to bring Syrian government and opposition representatives into U.N.-mediated talks by January 1.
“For me it is absolutely clear that yesterday’s horrors in Paris should convince the last skeptics that not only can terrorism not be justified by anything, but our passivity also cannot be justified by anything in the fight against this evil”, he said.
A Jordan-led discussion on who should be put on the unified list of terrorist organizations will take place within coming weeks, according to Bogdanov.
“Wrong [policies] adopted by Western states, particularly France, toward events in the region, and its ignorance of the support of a number of its allies to terrorists are reasons behind the expansion of terrorism”, the Post quotes Assad telling the French delegation.
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The Syrian president said that he had warned “what would happen in Europe for the past three years” if its leaders continued with their policies but his warnings were not heeded. Those groups that do not agree to stop fighting risk being branded terrorists, a designation that now is applied only to the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate.
